Like any operating system, it would be nice if Windows could
perform some tasks at a certain time of day
automatically.
You wouldn't have to be there starting up any command line
services, you wouldn't have to run any
particular tasks manually.
You can simply tell Windows to perform whatever task you like
at any particular time of day or day of week.
This works inside of Windows XP, Windows
Vista and Windows 7.
And inside of Vista and 7, you'll notice there are even
some predefined schedules that are already inside of the
operating system, which makes it very easy to simply find
what you like to run automatically.
You click it and then you schedule it,
and then you're done.
They are also folders that you can use to help organize these
particular scheduled tasks inside of Windows
Vista and Windows 7.
So that you can collect and organize exactly
what happens when.
In Windows XP, this is called schedule tasks.
And you'll find it inside of the control panel and Windows
Vista and Windows 7, it's in the Administrative Tools.
So you'll go to control panel, Administrative Tools, and
you'll run task scheduler from there.
Let's see what options we might have to schedule some
tasks in our Windows 7 desktop.
I'm going to click the Start menu and go to Control Panel.
And we know that the task scheduler is in
Administrative Tools.
And here's the icon for Task Scheduler.
You can see the scheduler is set up with the same Microsoft
management console field, so you have some things that you
can select on the left side of the screen.
You have options in the center that are based
on what you've selected.
And on the right side are actions that you can have.
Now you can see in my system that I have tasks that had
been configured and active tasks that are running that
are just built into Windows 7.
You may not even know that it's running these, but these
are the defaults that come with the operating system.
You can look at these tasks or you could even create your own
basic task.
You would then define the task, maybe we would like to
perform a system back up occasionally.
You can even choose when you would like that to occur,
would you like to be every day, maybe when the computer
starts up, or maybe once I log in.
Perhaps we'd run this every day.
And we would like to run it perhaps at 3
o'clock in the morning.
We can set our timing of exactly how we would like
these to occur.
We can even have it synchronized across different
time zones, if you have a lot of different computers that
are located different places around the world.
And you can set how many days you would like this to occur.
You could then choose the action.
So maybe we would like to start a program, maybe we
would like our system to send an email, or even display a
message on the screen.
Well my backup might be a script that I create.
I would simply put the script information here, add any
arguments, and you can even choose which folder this
application is going to start in.
And that's it, you've now created a task.
And you have that task that is loaded into the scheduler just
waiting for that time frame to occur.
There are a number of built in tasks in Windows as well.
Here's the task scheduler library.
And you can see under the Microsoft folder, there is a
Windows folder.
And you've got a lot of different options available.
If I go to defrag for instance, you can see that
there's already one that is scheduled and set up inside of
this that says, at 1 o'clock every Wednesday of every week,
they would like to run this process, and perform a
defragmentation.
It even tells you the last time it was run and whether
the operation was completed successfully.
And all of those things that we set up for this task are
also included down here at the bottom.
This is going to run as a particular user, here's the
triggers of when they start, here's the action that occurs.
It runs the defrag.exe program, the conditions that
must be associated with that.
Maybe you don't want this task to run if the computers busy
doing something else.
Maybe you want it to wait until the computer is idle for
a certain amount of time and only then
will you run the program.
There's different settings to choose how the
application will run.
And we've disabled history on this particular event, but you
could set up task scheduler to keep track of how this is run
over the period of time that you have set.
You also have the option within these folders to build
out your own task scheduler library itself.
I can create a new folder that's just for me and now I
can add whatever tasks that I would like to
put inside of it.
And build out my own structure, so that I can
organize and keep track of exactly what I've configured
to run, and when those things would be running.
So as you can see, task scheduler gives
you a lot of options.
You now have a lot of control on how you would automatically
run these applications on your computer.